Beloved people of
God, grace and peace to you from our Lord and Savior Jesus the Christ.
AMEN.

Jesus did not act
like a model guest at the dinner party described in our gospel reading.[1]
He was at the house of a leader of the Pharisees. The first thing he did was
violate Pharisaic teaching about not healing on the Sabbath. Jesus healed a man
with dropsy, an affliction involving excess accumulation of fluids in the body.
Prior to healing him, Jesus asked the lawyers and Pharisees in the room, “Is it lawful to cure people on the Sabbath,
or not?” After healing him, Jesus added a second question, “If one of you has a child or an ox that has
fallen into a well, will you not immediately pull it out on a Sabbath
day?”

Next, Jesus
offered unsolicited advice to his fellow guests on seating etiquette.[2]
He rebuked them for choosing places of honor. He exhorted them to sit in the
lowest places and wait for the host to come and say, “Friend, move up
higher.”

Finally, Jesus
critiqued the host for his exclusive guest list. The social norm for a
distinguished host was to invite friends, brothers, relatives, and rich
neighbors. Such guests were likely to return the favor and invite the host to
future dinner parties. But Jesus urged the host, “When you give a banquet, invite the poor,
the crippled, the lame, and the blind. And you will be blessed, because they
cannot repay you, for you will be repaid at the resurrection of the
righteous.” The poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind were considered
outcasts. According to Leviticus 21:17–23, such outcasts were not to serve as
priests. They tended to be excluded from the established religious community.
Yet Jesus told the host, an upstanding leader in the religious community, to
defy the religious norm and invite them. In the Parable of the Great Banquet,
which follows today’s gospel reading, Jesus stressed once again the importance
of inviting the outcasts.

In Luke 14 Jesus
may challenge the prevailing norms of Sabbath behavior and dinner etiquette, but
his primary concern was to instill humility in the community of God’s people. As
he states in Luke 14:11, “for all who
exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be
exalted.” Humility was seldom considered virtuous in the culture of that
time. Jesus was convinced that humility was essential to the well-being of his
followers— both as individuals and as a community of God. He challenged the
notion that places of honor in the community of God were reserved for a select
group of established or elite persons.

Our gospel reading
from Luke seems to have little or nothing to do with Earth care. There is no
talk of the consequences of ecological degradation such as “food and water shortages, rising coastal
waters, melting glaciers and ice sheets, loss of biodiversity, soil fatigue,
resource depletion, and various forms of pollution.”[3]
Neither Jesus nor the society in which he lived were facing imminent threat of
ecological catastrophe. Nonetheless, Jesus’ teaching on humility sheds light on
the ecological fix we are in.

At the risk of
oversimplifying the ecological crisis, one could argue: the root of the problem
is that human beings seized places of honor in the Earth community of all God’s
creatures and now the whole Earth community is paying the price. In a classic
1967 essay entitled “The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis,” Lynn White
Jr. leveled a blistering critique of the Christian tradition’s attitude toward
nature. According to the creation story in Genesis 1:28, “God blessed human beings, and God said to
them, `Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have
dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every
living thing that moves upon the earth.” Through the centuries many in the
Christian tradition have interpreted this blessing as a license to dominate the
rest of the Earth community. We have learned to exploit nature for what we
perceive to be our human benefit. There have certainly been benefits of the way
of life we adopted, but it is becoming more and more clear that our exploitive
way of life is ecologically unsustainable. God gave us a special responsibility
to care for the Earth community, but unfortunately we have misused that
responsibility.

How does God feel
about the role of human beings in bringing the Earth to the brink of ecological
disaster? The story of Noah gives us a clue. Growing up in the church, I loved
to sing the story of Noah and the Ark. I remember singing
often:

The Lord said to Noah: there's gonna be a
floody, floody. The Lord said to Noah: there's gonna be a floody, floody Get
those children out of the muddy, muddy, children of the
Lord.

So, rise and
shine, and give God the glory, glory. Rise and shine, \ and give God the glory,
glory. Rise and shine, and give God the glory, glory. Children of the
Lord.

We had so much fun
with this song, that we did not pay much attention to the deep sadness of God at
the beginning of the Noah story. In Genesis 6:5–6 we read: “The Lord saw that the wickedness of
humankind was great in the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of
their hearts was only evil continually. And the Lord was sorry that he had made
humankind on earth, and it grieved him to his heart.” God’s grief is so
intense that it cuts God to the heart. The Hebrew term translated as “grieve” is
also used in Genesis to refer to the pain of childbirth. So sorrowful is God by
what has transpired that God resolves to blot out human beings and all that God
has created.

The story
concludes on a more hopeful note. Noah and his family and all the creatures on
the ark survive; God establishes a new covenant with Noah and every living
thing; and God promises never again to send a flood to destroy the
earth.

God may have made
such a promise, but now the way we human beings are living threatens to produce
catastrophic flooding. Some argue the catastrophe has already
begun.

The current
edition of Time magazine includes an
article entitled “A `thousand-year storm’ hits Louisiana.” Waters have swamped levees “built to protect against more modest
flooding than what resulted from this so-called thousand-year storm.” As
Jack Dickey writes, “epic floods have hit
the South with alarming frequency in recent months.” These floods have “reminded some Louisianans of Hurricane
Katrina’s devastation, prompting a new round of worries about natural disasters
and man-made climate change.”[4]

2016 is on track
to be the hottest year in recorded history. The melting of ice sheets and
glaciers appears to be accelerating. That will, of course, only compound the
threat of catastrophic flooding around the global. Surely God’s heart must be
breaking to witness what we are doing to our God-given Earth
home.

What will it take
to address the urgent ecological crisis we face? Bill McKibben among others has
asserted that it will take a massive global effort dwarfing the massive national
effort Americans engaged in to win World War II.[5]
We in the church do not have any privileged expertise on addressing global
warming and its consequences. But we do know something about transforming
hearts. This massive global effort will require a major change of heart in many
privileged human beings. That change of heart will begin by sharing in God’s
grief over what we have wrought. It will not be easy to give up a way of life so
many of us hold dear. But literally the well-being of the whole Earth community
depends on it.

The hope is that
shared grief with God will move our hearts to give up the places of honor we
have seized. To put it bluntly, elite and privileged human beings need a huge
dose of humility. The least of these among us— both human and nonhuman— need to
be invited to occupy places of honor in the Earth community— places that in
God’s eyes they already occupy. The truth is: God created the Earth in such a
way that we will only thrive inasmuch as all members of the Earth community are
honored and inasmuch as we live together within our God-given limits. Other
creatures have a much better track record than privileged human beings of living
within their limits. As people of faith, as we ponder with God what is happening
to our Earth home, may we be grieved to the heart so that we may indeed be moved
to fulfill the covenant God has made with the whole Earth
community.